With Elsie’s return home, her faculty for turning off work, and her fund of good-humor, the circumference of the Busy Fingers Club was constantly increasing. Now that Gilbert was away so much, she took his place at the bench on the Saturdays allotted to the Club, and if she did not exhibit his dexterity in directing and executing work, she yet preserved order and made fast friends of the boys under her charge. She was so fertile in suggestion that a good many new ideas took shape in inventive heads and found expression in beautiful and useful things in wood. “Some day,” said Elsie sagely, “we’ll have a bazaar and sell these things, and oh, won’t we be rich!”
“What’ll we do with our money?” cried the boys.
“Put it in the bank until we can find some great and glorious need for it.”
“Like buying me a bicycle!” shouted one of the lads.
“And me a base-ball outfit!”
“And me a fiddle!”
“And me a musical top!”
“And me a white elephant!” cried Elsie. But the laugh did not rout the idea of doing something in the way of a bazaar. It spread among the girls and incited them to renewed effort; and it grew to be an open secret in the neighborhood that in the glowing but indefinite sometime, great things were to be achieved by the now well-known Busy Fingers Club.
It was the last of November and Antoine had returned from the hospital, able to walk with the aid of one crutch and the promise of discarding that when exercise and development had perfected the cure. A happier woman than Lizzette Minaud seldom walked the earth. All her dreams and anticipations of good fortune seemed to be winging their way to realization. Antoine was getting well; for now that the lad had been lifted to his full stature, the deformed shoulders seemed to be straightening, the color came and went in the once pale cheeks, and the laughter in his heart made a constant music for her.
“Oh, eet ees all von blessed Providence, mon Herbeart,” she cried as he sat at her right hand, the honored guest at the little banquet she had prepared at Idlewild to welcome Antoine’s home-coming. “Surely le bon Dieu direct ze noble heart to help my boy, and——”